Digitabulus laboris

Today I took a walk during my lunchbreak to see how spring is coming along. The silver maples are still in bloom, as are the crocuses, but that’s about it. Along the railroad tracks I spotted this:

Digitabulus laboris

For a few milliseconds after glimpsing this, I thought it was some sort of monocot with nice thick leaves pushing defiantly up through the soil, but upon closer inspection… ok, it’s an old work glove. Or as they might say in Latin, “Digitabulus laboris”.

The black locust is budding though.

Robinia pseudoacacia

I thought I might meander over to LL Bean while I was out, but there was a car accident on the sidewalk along that route, so I just took my usual lap. Had I gone to Bean, I would probably have missed the sprouting of the glove.

When I got home I went out to check my sap bucket. It had half a gallon of sap in it, but it also had a dozen mosquitoes and a moth. That’s the sign that syruping season has come to an end, so I dumped it out and removed my tap. I have a couple of gallons of unboiled sap to process now, along with some that I reduced by about 20:1 last week. I’ll prolly mix them together and boil it down tomorrow evening. Then that’s it until next year.

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4 Responses to “Digitabulus laboris”

I learned the Latin names the same time I learned the common names (on most plants I know anyhow). It wasn’t that much harder. I tried to drive it into my head by participating in a now-defunct online phenology project, logging whatever was in bloom, and that was organized by binomial name.

Unfortunately, I always have to refresh my memory in the spring. For this one, I had to Google the Latin for “glove” and “work” (adjectives follow nouns).